Get the right information, with visual impact, to the people who need it
After almost 32 years, I am retiring from SAS.
It might snow this weekend here at the SAS headquarters! This would be the first snow of the season for us, and it got me thinking about snow again (see some of my previous blog posts about snow). Apparently these thoughts have manifested themselves in my computer graphics work ...
When a Visual Analytics 8.3 report moves on a screen from one page to the next – all by itself, without a human hovering over a keyboard – you're seeing the Report Playback feature of SAS Visual Analytics Viewer 8.3 in action. Reasons for using visual movement Playable dashboards are
When a graph includes several markers or line styles, it is often useful to create a legend that explains the relationship between the data and the symbols, color, and line styles in the graph. The SGPLOT procedure does a good job of automatically creating and placing a legend for most
In August 2018, Hurricane Florence came on shore in North Carolina. Much of the damage was from flooding because the storm moved slowly over North and South Carolina. Parts of North Carolina had over 30 inches of rain from the storm, and this caused many of North Carolina’s rivers to
The 6th maintenance release of SAS 9.4 is now available for users. Along with it comes a new SG procedure - the SGPIE procedure (pre-production). The primary audience for the SG procedures has been the analytical user, for creating effective displays of analytical data. However, the rich feature set of these
Do you remember The Matrix movies, that started coming out in 1999? Hopefully this movie franchise didn't give you a fear of virtual reality and AI. The thing I remember most from the movie was the really cool slow-motion video effects (from multiple angles) in the fight scenes. And the
Last week my colleague, Robert Allison, visualized data regarding immunization rates for kindergarten classes in North Carolina. One of his graphs was a scatter plot that displayed the proportion of unimmunized students versus the size of the class for 1,885 kindergarten classes in NC. This scatter plot is the basis
This week I noticed that they've started building the lot where they sell Christmas trees near SAS (at the intersection of Maynard & Reedy Creek Rd). They put up a nice rustic wooden fence, and lights, and maybe even a fire pit to keep their workers warm. They sell some
I recently read an article that said a school in Asheville, North Carolina had the worst chickenpox outbreak in the state in 2 decades. The article was interesting, and it also let me know I had a hole in my knowledge ... "What?!? - There's a chickenpox vaccine?!?" When I
Starting with SAS 9.4M6, procedures that used to be provided with a SAS/GRAPH installation are now available with Base SAS. Using these procedures along with PROC SGMAP can help you create some very nice maps. This blog builds on previous posts and highlights the: MAPSSAS Data Sets GREMOVE procedure %CENTROID
A few days back I published an article on including more subject data in a Waterfall graph. This was motivated by the desire from many users to view more data in the same graph, thus avoiding the need to refer to different graphs for the relevant information. In this case,
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this year's midterm election, when it comes to counting the ballots ... and I kept hearing the term provisional ballots in the news. But I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't really know much about provisional ballots. I decided to do a
The US 'midterm' elections have finally started to wind down, and we finally have some (mostly) finalized results to study. But what's the best way to visualize who won the US congressional seats in each of the 435 districts? Let's dive into this topic!... Preparation For starters, I couldn't find
An ROC curve graphically summarizes the tradeoff between true positives and true negatives for a rule or model that predicts a binary response variable. An ROC curve is a parametric curve that is constructed by varying the cutpoint value at which estimated probabilities are considered to predict the binary event.
Previously, I have written articles on how we could display more subject response data along with the traditional WaterFall graph showing the best "Change from Baseline". This is in response to the desire to see data like treatment duration for each subject in the same graph. Otherwise, investigators have to
The SGPLOT procedure enables you to use the value of a response variable to color markers or areas in a graph. For example, you can use the COLORRESPONSE= option to define a variable whose values will be used to color markers in a scatter plot or cells in a heat
With the recent midterm elections here in the US, I frequently saw congressional district maps popping up in the news. And being a GraphGuy, I wanted to fully understand these maps, to see if I might could improve them. If you're interested in congressional district maps, follow along as I
With today being an election day here in the US, I see a lot of people wearing the 'I Voted' sticker. This got me wondering if I could create my own sticker ... using SAS software and simple graphics primitives. :-) So I started by using Proc Gslide to create
I've collected accelerometer data with a third-party app. I've used some SAS tricks to import all of my data readings in a single step. Now I'm ready to create a report of these data in SAS Visual Analytics.
Who says technical people can't have fun!?! Similar to Throwback Thursday / #TBT (when people post one of their old/nostalgic photos on social media), I like the tradition of Fun Friday when I use a fun data topic to test our software - a test can be just as rigorous using
The TEXT plot was introduced with SAS 9.4M2 to facilitate placement of text strings in a graph. This replaces the MARKERCHAR feature of the SCATTER plot statement, which is still available, but it is better to use TEXT plot in most cases. The syntax is: text x=column y=column text=column </
President Donald Trump - people seem to either love him or hate him. Which makes for an interesting data-analysis topic ... tracking Trump's approval rating. Follow along as I explore some data! I'll start with what I consider the 'best' approval-rating graph I've found so far. Here's a screen-capture of
This article is the first in a series of three publications covering REST APIs and their use in, and with SAS. Today, I want to cover a basic example using SAS Viya REST APIs to download an image from a report in SAS Visual Analytics.
A useful feature in PROC SGPLOT is the ability to easily visualize subgroups of data. Most statements in the SGPLOT procedure support a GROUP= option that enables you to overlay plots of subgroups. When you use the GROUP= option, observations are assigned attributes (colors, line patterns, symbols, ...) that indicate
The other day I was playing around with the voter registration data for all ~8 million registered voters in North Carolina (yes - this guy knows how to have fun!), and I got to wondering what last names were the most common. I summarized the data by county, and the
Recently a colleague was requested to create a bar chart showing the performance of students in a school compared to county and state wide schools. The solution using SGPLOT was simple as shown below. /*--Create data--*/ data school; input Year Group $ Value; format Value percent5.1; datalines;
This past Sunday was the last day of the NC State Fair, and we broke some records this year! Can you guess what those records were? I'll ramble on about the fair to give you time to come up with your guess, and then I'll let you know about the
Have you noticed a lot of graphs popping up lately, about politicians, voters, and elections? ... Well of course - it's an election year! If you follow my blog posts, then you're probably a bit "smarter than the average bear" when it comes to scrutinizing graphs. And election graphs election
Any of you who are even slightly into politics, or have followed any news lately, have probably seen something about the DNA test Elizabeth Warren took to prove/disprove her Native American ancestry. The test indicates she might have had a Native American ancestor 6 to 10 generations ago. That's a
